With processor speed increasing much more rapidly than memory access speed, there is a growing performance gap between processor and memory in computers. More particularly, processor speed continues to adhere to Moore's law (approximately doubling every 18 months). By comparison memory access speed has been increasing at the relatively glacial rate of 10% per year. Consequently, there is a rapidly growing processor-memory performance gap. Computer architects have tried to mitigate the performance impact of this imbalance with small high-speed cache memories that store recently accessed data. This solution is effective only if most of the data referenced by a program is available in the cache. Unfortunately, many general-purpose programs, which use dynamic, pointer-based data structures, often suffer from high cache miss rates, and therefore are limited by memory system performance.